Winter, with its maddening holiday mobs which descend on parking lots and disperse through malls, mobilizing like a furious phalanx, is enough to send Nero rushing back to the womb-like respite of a shadowy movie theater. Don't get me wrong, fair readers, Nero's no Scrooze and welcomes the saccharine lip-smack of the candy cane with the best of them. But one can only stuff one's proverbial stockings, peruse the perfume counter, and tear up a cruise ship with the Chipmunks for so long. Yes, eventually and not a moment too soon, darkness always seems to come a' calling to dampen Nero's door.

Just in time to sedate this over-pumped season, methinks a pair of movies will serve as the perfect pill -- the pop-fizz times two -- antacid to quell the gingerbread headrush. It's no coincidence that both A Dangerous Method and Shame are helmed by actor Michael Fassbender, whose piercing intensity is its own sort of pleasure principle. In the first film, Fassbender plays Carl Jung, doctor to Russian patient Keira Knightley and friend to Freud, embodied by Viggo Mortensen. Sound intense, thickly-accented and complicated? I'll leave you to work through your Daddy issues. I say bring Vienna on.

In Shame, Fassbender puts the, er, ass, in his name, playing a sex addict with his own family matters to contend with. The raw and revealing performance gleaned the film an NC-17 rating and a plethora of awards from the European film folk, who better understand this sort of twisted sister stuff. Nero's id is itching to take in both peep shows. Though at this rate I'll likely have to squeeze the screenings in during a hot cocoa break between near-death dashes 'round the ice skating rink and visits to spy on the Sugar Plum Fairy.